


Into Ashes

by steelneena



Series: Fire and Water and Dark of Night [1]
Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Extreme angst, F/M, Female Apprentice, Gender Neutral Apprentice, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, Male Apprentice, Other, Pre-Canon, all options available, asra finds out the apprentice's fate, descriptions of death and extreme illness, descriptions of what goes on at the Lazerat, so we know how that goes, the character death is obviously the MC, vague descriptions of/insinuation of burning alive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2020-09-28 06:22:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20421344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steelneena/pseuds/steelneena
Summary: Even when he left Vesuvia, Asra always assumed he would return, when it was over, and they would pick up the pieces of their shattered relationship and forge a new path together.Only, things get worse before they get better.They always do.And then, the unspeakable happened.





	1. Female Apprentice

**Author's Note:**

> Hi my friends made me an absolute slut for this game in like three days. 3 chapters is simply me reuploading the chapters with different pronouns for the Apprentice (she, he and they, just to cover the basics), so that readers can pick according to preference.

Like the scent of jasmine tea, or the wafting perfume of a gardenia, it was always intoxicating when she smiled at him. Asra could never push away the feeling that welled up in his chest; the same feeling that constricted his heart also managed to opened it. So much pain and fear and loneliness had followed him through his childhood, and while he’d always striven to remain bright in the face of sorrow, it had never been easy on his own, or when he was the only goodness in Muriel’s life, and he had none of his own in turn. Meeting her, learning her, being with her had changed everything for him. She was always the light that drove it away when he couldn’t do it by himself any longer. Always the hand to bear him up when he threatened to capsize, the strength to hold him steady in a world that pushed and pulled like crashing waves, twice his height, submerging the docks in the flood season. Even when they fought – and they’d certainly fought – Asra knew that she was the beginning and the end for him.

That she always had been.

That she always would be.

Devotion seared his soul in a brand he could never be rid of, rent his heart into two, twitching halves.

One, behind in Vesuvia; the other, with him, in Nopal.

She knew all of him. She knew of his parents, of Muriel, of Lucien, of the Arcana and his patron. Of his magic, the magic that they shared between them, a deep, unrelenting silvered thread of light that resonated and reverberated to his core, tied on his heartstrings so tightly that they would never sever.

Even at a distance, such a long, long way away, he could still feel her.

At first, he’d thought that was what hurt the most. Her soul was in pain; the dark and terrible things that were happening all around her, which she’d chosen to bear, were more than anyone could be asked to endure. And yet, even when he’d begged her. Even when he’d pleaded…

He’d only wanted to leave the onslaught of death behind. What little sincere happiness he’d managed to find and hold onto was more precious than anything. But she’d disagreed. He’d known she would. It wasn’t in her to leave Vesuvia behind. It wasn’t in her to do less than her best, to give anything but her all to save the people of the city, even when it was clear that total destruction was the only path left. And despite his tears, despite the unmendable fissure in his heart at being so very far from her, Asra didn’t have it in him to begrudge her her decisions.

In the end, he’d left her behind.

_He_ left _her_.

Not the other way around.

The fissure in his heart was the first of many cracks, ever more spitting and dividing as the days went by. Distance and time did little to heal his heart’s wounds, only allowing them to bleed more. Often, his thoughts swirled anxiously; more than once he nearly left Nopal to return to Vesuvia, plague be damned. But the little voice that whispered at the back of his head told him to wait. When it was over, he could go back. When it was over, he could return, he could fall to his knees, he could beg, _beg_, her to forgive him, to take him back, to see that he only meant to preserve their lives.

(Because if she remained behind, there was no choice but for it to all be over one day. She _couldn’t_ fall with the city, the way he’d been so afraid it would. If she was there…she _had_ to be alright. There was no acceptable alternative.)

And then, the news came that they were dying by the thousands, and Asra’s heart fluttered as feebly as a butterfly caught in a storm over the sea. He wasted no more time waiting for something that seemed so far out of reach. If everyone was going to die, and if she insisted on remaining behind, then he’d return, and be with her, because that was better than nothing. The news came and he wasted no time in leaving the little house he’d made for himself.

A house, not a home, because she wasn’t there beside him. As beautiful a place as it was, it was empty and featureless without her, when all he could think was that she was meant to be there beside him, meant to fill the empty spaces and the silent moments that reigned in the little adobe. Never had he hated being alone – truly alone – until then.

He thought.

Vesuvia was far different than the home he remembered. The streets were barren and the only sounds were of weeping, and a foul stench and dark smoke flooded the streets. He ignored it all. Outside the shop, their sign still hung, her mortar and pestle, surrounded by his snake, the indicator of their union, their partnership, but when he went to the door only to find it without its usual protections, his fragile heart shook in his breast. Inside, the floors were dusty, the shelves empty of the usual wares. Upstairs, in their room, the bed was made, but the closet empty.

Unlived in.

The palace, he reassured himself. Of course. Where else? She’d stayed behind to help, and that was where all who desired to provide aid had been summoned.

One last look around the place that had been…that _was_ his home, and Asra stalked out, fresh tears burning in his eyes. It could be home again, but only if she would let him. It was her shop, before it was theirs. Her home, before she invited him into it. Her bed before she’d pulled him into it.

(_He_ had left _her_.)

At the palace, the guards escorted him around the structure, to the docks hidden behind. He’d been inside before, a few times when he was older, after they met Nadia; the common folk were able to enjoy the Masquerade, but only, of course, from a distance, and so he'd been barred most of his life. When they reached the docks, much to his surprise, he was placed in a boat. When he asked, they said little. The island beyond, over which hung a black and ashy grey miasma, was the quarantine location. If he wanted to help, that was where it could be done. Neither stepped foot on land themselves, but another two were waiting. The structure they brought him to was unlike anything he imagined. Dark, curtained, and dank, Asra felt his heart plummet. Here was where the dying spent their last days on earth, in the bleak and the grime. The stink of the place was incredible, the unmistakable reek of illness, of the dead and dying. And something else. Something that eluded him. Distinct. Uncomfortable.

He was brought before a nurse, and left there, to wait, anxiously, for him to have a moment to speak with him. Silently, he watched the white coated doctors and their assistants as they worked to the discordant chorus of moans and coughs, crying and wheezing. Silently, Asra took his fill, his punishment. This was what he’d left her with. This was what he’d abandoned her to endure alone, while he wiled his days away in isolated comfort, and then, not even had the gall to enjoy it. Without her, it had been meaningless. But it was anything but the torture he’d imagined it to be, he realized, looking out at the desolation the plague had wrought.

This was what she had chosen.

In his disgust, Asra felt shame, and though he wanted to close his eyes, he found himself unable to look away.

The nurse stood from the desk without acknowledging him and, though he started to speak, the man disappeared behind a curtain, leaving Asra alone in the wake of the plague’s devastation. Three personnel came out from another room, two carrying either end of a stretcher, a still moving body covered with a sheet between them, the third, a tall fellow with deep red hair, peeling off towards the desk. Morbidly, Asra was drawn to the route that the two took, watching as a hand slide off from beneath, pale and bone thin, grasping at Asra as they passed.

“Excu-excuse me!” he said, rather softly as the other passed him by on the way to the desk. “I’m looking for someone who works here. Please, have you seen-“

The doctor looked up, and his eyebrows twitched, and his frown, ever present, deepened. “You’re Asra. The magician.”

Taken aback, Asra shifted, and watched, realization dawning on his features, as the Doctor’s face contorted into an expression of deep, inextinguishable sorrow. The tears were burning hot across his cheeks before he realized they’d welled. “N-no. No..” his voice was small, wavering, and fearful, even as he shook his head viciously in denial. “No!” He fairly sobbed the word. Inside his chest, the fragile remnants of his heart shattered, and the half that was her, the half he’d thought he’d already lost, burst and bled, an open wound against his soul. Agony ripped through him as he fell to his knees, wretchedly, weeping, his mouth open in a silent scream.

“She went to the Lazarat a week ago. I’m…I’m sorry.”

“The Lazarat?” he managed, swallowing his sobs.

The look the Doctor gave him in return was one that he couldn’t bear to face, and finally, Asra allowed himself to shut his eyes, lashes thick with tears, and slump to the ground further.

“There’s a cemetery out behind the Lazarat. You…you can…she’s…there.”

Wordless, soundless, expressionless, Asra finally rose, and without so much as an indicator that he’d heart, turned and left the doctor where he stood, resigned and apologetic.

The place where his heart beat, ragged and ruined, was slowly ebbing to a sort of dull ache as his vision glazed, his hearing muted, his vision dimmed, the pain so overwhelming that processing it was impossible. That the only recourse was to completely shut down. A figure brushed past him, and he felt himself reach out for their arm, stopping them. He heart himself asking the question, though his mind wouldn’t stop screaming, and his ravaged heart kept leaking blood, so much that he was sure it would seep through his skin, find its way to the surface, to cool and dry.

He heard the answer, too.

_“The Lazaret? That’s where they take the ones who are beyond saving. That’s where they’re burned. I’ll never forget the sound of their screams.”_

It was all Asra could do to take another step. And another, and another.

_“Are you alright? Excuse me, did you hear me?”_

Another. Another.

Slow at first, and then faster, until he was bursting through the doors, flying along towards the column of smoke, towards the crematorium, towards the soft grey ash that billowed up like clouds, towards the uneven mounds of black sooty soil, simply marked, which lay beyond. He tripped, fell to his knees, crawled through the dirt on his hands and knees to the most recent patch, eyes frantically scanning the names etched haphazardly on the basic markers for the most achingly familiar shape of her name. Maybe she wasn’t there, maybe it was a mistake, maybe she’d left, recognizing futility and headed for Nopal, and he’d just missed her. Maybe it was someone else. Anyone else.

Anyone but her.

Anyone!

There, the hard consonants and the soft vowels that comprised her name arranged themselves in order along the wooden board that served as her only memoriam. For a moment, Asra was petrified in place, and then, that silvered heartstring snapped and the world, which had stilled and zoomed into that one point of focus came rushing back, loud and agonizing. Rough screams haunted the clearing, cut off every few moments by sudden silence. The smell of burning flesh hung thick in the air and he could taste the ash in his mouth, could feel it sticking in his hair, clinging to his damp cheeks, coating his lungs. Before he knew he was moving, scrabbling at the dirt with his bare hands until they were caked in it, until his nails broke and the tender flesh bled dark and watery into the soil, until the blackened, charred fragments of bone found his hands and he collapsed over her grave.

This, this was torture. This was worse than death, to know that he had abandoned her to her death. That he had left her to the most awful of fates. That she had died alone.

That he hadn’t known it.

The bloodsoaked remnants of his heart quaked and tremored, crumbling finally to dust, and he spread himself across the grave, intermingling his wounded soul with all that remained of her earthly body.

He lay there he knew not how long, waiting, waiting to be infected, to die, to lose himself as he had always lost everyone else. His parents, her, Muriel…

He waited to turn to ash and bone.

They sky had already been dark when he arrived, the clouds of smoke enough to blot out the sun even on a bright day, but the moon rose, and Asra slowly blinked back to consciousness. Somehow, resiliently, a piece of his heart still beat. Punishment. Punishment worse than death.

Asra rose, a ghost in the night, a shade of what he had once been. Kneeling before the marker, he pressed a chaste kiss to the head of her grave and recovered it with languished movements.

Death was a recourse he was not to be allowed.

True death was a kindness he hadn’t earned.

As he walked away, a limping, wounded creature, unrecognizable to himself, to the world, he looked up to the moon and swallowed the shaking breaths that filled his beleaguered lungs. Asra slid his hands along his cheeks, smearing the ash away, his expression blank and hard.

Inside the hospital building, the staff avoided him, ironic, considering, but he walked without hesitation through the building until he found the doctor who had known her, biting his lip as he pulled a sheet over a patient who was sobbing silently.

“Oh. You…you’re back.”

He had no words, he found, even when standing there before the man’s pitying expression.

“A moment, if you will.”

Asra waited, and the doctor returned with a small box.

“Her things. Someone should have them. I’m…I’m sorry.”

The box felt weightless in Asra’s hands as he took it without complaint, and turned to go.

The night was silent. The guards that rowed him back over did so only at the doctor’s order, and said nothing to him in turn.

He found the shop just the way he’d left it, open to any and all, abandoned, empty, gutted, and yet, full to the brim with ghosts. Leaving the box on the counter, Asra took the steps one at a time. In the bedroom, he sat on the floor in the moonlight, eyes dry, hands in his lap, and did not sleep, as the ghosts of the past drifted around him, taunting and tempting and beyond all reach.


	2. Male Apprentice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please let me know if any of the pronouns are wrong and I will fix them.

Like the scent of jasmine tea, or the wafting perfume of a gardenia, it was always intoxicating when he smiled at him. Asra could never push away the feeling that welled up in his chest; the same feeling that constricted his heart also managed to opened it. So much pain and fear and loneliness had followed him through his childhood, and while he’d always striven to remain bright in the face of sorrow, it had never been easy on his own, or when he was the only goodness in Muriel’s life, and he had none of his own in turn. Meeting him, learning him, being with him had changed everything for him. He was always the light that drove it away when he couldn’t do it by himself any longer. Always the hand to bear him up when he threatened to capsize, the strength to hold him steady in a world that pushed and pulled like crashing waves, twice his height, submerging the docks in the flood season. Even when they fought – and they’d certainly fought – Asra knew that he was the beginning and the end for him.

That he always had been.

That he always would be.

Devotion seared his soul in a brand he could never be rid of, rent his heart into two, twitching halves.

One, behind in Vesuvia; the other, with him, in Nopal.

He knew all of him. He knew of his parents, of Muriel, of Lucien, of the Arcana and his patron. Of his magic, the magic that they shared between them, a deep, unrelenting silvered thread of light that resonated and reverberated to his core, tied on his heartstrings so tightly that they would never sever.

Even at a distance, such a long, long way away, he could still feel him.

At first, he’d thought that was what hurt the most. His soul was in pain; the dark and terrible things that were happening all around him, which he'd chosen to bear, were more than anyone could be asked to endure. And yet, even when he’d begged him. Even when he’d pleaded…

He’d only wanted to leave the onslaught of death behind. What little sincere happiness he’d managed to find and hold onto was more precious than anything. But he’d disagreed. He’d known he would. It wasn’t in him to leave Vesuvia behind. It wasn’t in him to do less than his best, to give anything but his all to save the people of the city, even when it was clear that total destruction was the only path left. And despite his tears, despite the unmendable fissure in his heart at being so very far from him, Asra didn’t have it in him to begrudge him his decisions.

In the end, he’d left him behind.

_He_ left _him_.

Not the other way around.

The fissure in his heart was the first of many cracks, ever more spitting and dividing as the days went by. Distance and time did little to heal his heart’s wounds, only allowing them to bleed more. Often, his thoughts swirled anxiously; more than once he nearly left Nopal to return to Vesuvia, plague be damned. But the little voice that whispered at the back of his head told him to wait. When it was over, he could go back. When it was over, he could return, he could fall to his knees, he could beg, _beg_, him to forgive him, to take him back, to see that he only meant to preserve their lives.

(Because if he remained behind, there was no choice but for it to all be over one day. He _couldn’t_ fall with the city, the way he’d been so afraid it would. If he was there…he _had_ to be alright. There was no acceptable alternative.)

And then, the news came that they were dying by the thousands, and Asra’s heart fluttered as feebly as a butterfly caught in a storm over the sea. He wasted no more time waiting for something that seemed so far out of reach. If everyone was going to die, and if he insisted on remaining behind, then he’d return, and be with him, because that was better than nothing. The news came and he wasted no time in leaving the little house he’d made for himself.

A house, not a home, because he wasn’t there beside him. As beautiful a place as it was, it was empty and featureless without him, when all he could think was that he was meant to be there beside him, meant to fill the empty spaces and the silent moments that reigned in the little adobe. Never had he hated being alone – truly alone – until then.

He thought.

Vesuvia was far different than the home he remembered. The streets were barren and the only sounds were of weeping, and a foul stench and dark smoke flooded the streets. He ignored it all. Outside the shop, their sign still hung, his mortar and pestle, surrounded by his snake, the indicator of their union, their partnership, but when he went to the door only to find it without its usual protections, his fragile heart shook in his breast. Inside, the floors were dusty, the shelves empty of the usual wares. Upstairs, in their room, the bed was made, but the closet empty.

Unlived in.

The palace, he reassured himself. Of course. Where else? He’d stayed behind to help, and that was where all who desired to provide aid had been summoned.

One last look around the place that had been…that _was_ his home, and Asra stalked out, fresh tears burning in his eyes. It could be home again, but only if he would let him. It was his shop, before it was theirs. His home, before he invited him into it. His bed before he’d pulled him into it.

(_He_ had left _him_.)

At the palace, the guards escorted him around the structure, to the docks hidden behind. He’d been inside before, a few times when he was older, after they met Nadia; the common folk were able to enjoy the Masquerade, but only, of course, from a distance, and so he'd been barred most of his life. When they reached the docks, much to his surprise, he was placed in a boat. When he asked, they said little. The island beyond, over which hung a black and ashy grey miasma, was the quarantine location. If he wanted to help, that was where it could be done. Neither stepped foot on land themselves, but another two were waiting. The structure they brought him to was unlike anything he imagined. Dark, curtained, and dank, Asra felt his heart plummet. Here was where the dying spent their last days on earth, in the bleak and the grime. The stink of the place was incredible, the unmistakable reek of illness, of the dead and dying. And something else. Something that eluded him. Distinct. Uncomfortable.

He was brought before a nurse, and left there, to wait, anxiously, for him to have a moment to speak with him. Silently, he watched the white coated doctors and their assistants as they worked to the discordant chorus of moans and coughs, crying and wheezing. Silently, Asra took his fill, his punishment. This was what he’d left him with. This was what he’d abandoned him to endure alone, while he wiled his days away in isolated comfort, and then, not even had the gall to enjoy it. Without him, it had been meaningless. But it was anything but the torture he’d imagined it to be, he realized, looking out at the desolation the plague had wrought.

This was what he had chosen.

In his disgust, Asra felt shame, and though he wanted to close his eyes, he found himself unable to look away.

The nurse stood from the desk without acknowledging him and, though he started to speak, the man disappeared behind a curtain, leaving Asra alone in the wake of the plague’s devastation. Three personnel came out from another room, two carrying either end of a stretcher, a still moving body covered with a sheet between them, the third, a tall fellow with deep red hair, peeling off towards the desk. Morbidly, Asra was drawn to the route that the two took, watching as a hand slide off from beneath, pale and bone thin, grasping at Asra as they passed.

“Excu-excuse me!” he said, rather softly as the other passed him by on the way to the desk. “I’m looking for someone who works here. Please, have you seen-“

The doctor looked up, and his eyebrows twitched, and his frown, ever present, deepened. “You’re Asra. The magician.”

Taken aback, Asra shifted, and watched, realization dawning on his features, as the Doctor’s face contorted into an expression of deep, inextinguishable sorrow. The tears were burning hot across his cheeks before he realized they’d welled. “N-no. No..” his voice was small, wavering, and fearful, even as he shook his head viciously in denial. “No!” He fairly sobbed the word. Inside his chest, the fragile remnants of his heart shattered, and the half that was him, the half he’d thought he’d already lost, burst and bled, an open wound against his soul. Agony ripped through him as he fell to his knees, wretchedly, weeping, his mouth open in a silent scream.

“He went to the Lazarat a week ago. I’m…I’m sorry.”

“The Lazarat?” he managed, swallowing his sobs.

The look the Doctor gave him in return was one that he couldn’t bear to face, and finally, Asra allowed himself to shut his eyes, lashes thick with tears, and slump to the ground further.

“There’s a cemetery out behind the Lazarat. You…you can…he’s…there.”

Wordless, soundless, expressionless, Asra finally rose, and without so much as an indicator that he’d heart, turned and left the doctor where he stood, resigned and apologetic.

The place where his heart beat, ragged and ruined, was slowly ebbing to a sort of dull ache as his vision glazed, his hearing muted, his vision dimmed, the pain so overwhelming that processing it was impossible. That the only recourse was to completely shut down. A figure brushed past him, and he felt himself reach out for their arm, stopping them. He heart himself asking the question, though his mind wouldn’t stop screaming, and his ravaged heart kept leaking blood, so much that he was sure it would seep through his skin, find its way to the surface, to cool and dry.

He heard the answer, too.

_“The Lazaret? That’s where they take the ones who are beyond saving. That’s where they’re burned. I’ll never forget the sound of their screams.”_

It was all Asra could do to take another step. And another, and another.

_“Are you alright? Excuse me, did you hear me?”_

Another. Another.

Slow at first, and then faster, until he was bursting through the doors, flying along towards the column of smoke, towards the crematorium, towards the soft grey ash that billowed up like clouds, towards the uneven mounds of black sooty soil, simply marked, which lay beyond. He tripped, fell to his knees, crawled through the dirt on his hands and knees to the most recent patch, eyes frantically scanning the names etched haphazardly on the basic markers for the most achingly familiar shape of his name. Maybe he wasn’t there, maybe it was a mistake, maybe he’d left, recognizing futility and headed for Nopal, and he’d just missed his. Maybe it was someone else. Anyone else.

Anyone but him.

Anyone!

There, the hard consonants and the soft vowels that comprised his name arranged themselves in order along the wooden board that served as his only memoriam. For a moment, Asra was petrified in place, and then, that silvered heartstring snapped and the world, which had stilled and zoomed into that one point of focus came rushing back, loud and agonizing. Rough screams haunted the clearing, cut off every few moments by sudden silence. The smell of burning flesh hung thick in the air and he could taste the ash in his mouth, could feel it sticking in his hair, clinging to his damp cheeks, coating his lungs. Before he knew he was moving, scrabbling at the dirt with his bare hands until they were caked in it, until his nails broke and the tender flesh bled dark and watery into the soil, until the blackened, charred fragments of bone found his hands and he collapsed over his grave.

This, this was torture. This was worse than death, to know that he had abandoned him to his death. That he had left him to the most awful of fates. That he had died alone.

That he hadn’t known it.

The bloodsoaked remnants of his heart quaked and tremoured, crumbling finally to dust, and he spread himself across the grave, intermingling his wounded soul with all that remained of his earthly body.

He lay there he knew not how long, waiting, waiting to be infected, to die, to lose himself as he had always lost everyone else. His parents, him, Muriel…

He waited to turn to ash and bone.

They sky had already been dark when he arrived, the clouds of smoke enough to blot out the sun even on a bright day, but the moon rose, and Asra slowly blinked back to consciousness. Somehow, resiliently, a piece of his heart still beat. Punishment. Punishment worse than death.

Asra rose, a ghost in the night, a shade of what he had once been. Kneeling before the marker, he pressed a chaste kiss to the head of his grave and recovered it with languished movements.

Death was a recourse he was not to be allowed.

True death was a kindness he hadn’t earned.

As he walked away, a limping, wounded creature, unrecognizable to himself, to the world, he looked up to the moon and swallowed the shaking breaths that filled his beleaguered lungs. Asra slid his hands along his cheeks, smearing the ash away, his expression blank and hard.

Inside the hospital building, the staff avoided him, ironic, considering, but he walked without hesitation through the building until he found the doctor who had known him, biting his lip as he pulled a sheet over a patient who was sobbing silently.

“Oh. You…you’re back.”

He had no words, he found, even when standing there before the man’s pitying expression.

“A moment, if you will.”

Asra waited, and the doctor returned with a small box.

“His things. Someone should have them. I’m…I’m sorry.”

The box felt weightless in Asra’s hands as he took it without complaint, and turned to go.

The night was silent. The guards that rowed him back over did so only at the doctor’s order, and said nothing to him in turn.

He found the shop just the way he’d left it, open to any and all, abandoned, empty, gutted, and yet, full to the brim with ghosts. Leaving the box on the counter, Asra took the steps one at a time. In the bedroom, he sat on the floor in the moonlight, eyes dry, hands in his lap, and did not sleep, as the ghosts of the past drifted around him, taunting and tempting and beyond all reach.


	3. Gender Neutral Apprentice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please let me know if any of the pronouns are wrong and I will fix them.

Like the scent of jasmine tea, or the wafting perfume of a gardenia, it was always intoxicating when they smiled at him. Asra could never push away the feeling that welled up in his chest; the same feeling that constricted his heart also managed to opened it. So much pain and fear and loneliness had followed him through his childhood, and while he’d always striven to remain bright in the face of sorrow, it had never been easy on his own, or when he was the only goodness in Muriel’s life, and he had none of his own in turn. Meeting them, learning them, being with them had changed everything for him. They were always the light that drove it away when he couldn’t do it by himself any longer. Always the hand to bear him up when he threatened to capsize, the strength to hold him steady in a world that pushed and pulled like crashing waves, twice his height, submerging the docks in the flood season. Even when they fought – and they’d certainly fought – Asra knew that they were the beginning and the end for him.

That they always had been.

That they always would be.

Devotion seared his soul in a brand he could never be rid of, rent his heart into two, twitching halves.

One, behind in Vesuvia; the other, with him, in Nopal.

They knew all of him. They knew of his parents, of Muriel, of Lucien, of the Arcana and his patron. Of his magic, the magic that they shared between them, a deep, unrelenting silvered thread of light that resonated and reverberated to his core, tied on his heartstrings so tightly that they would never sever.

Even at a distance, such a long, long way away, he could still feel them.

At first, he’d thought that was what hurt the most. Their soul was in pain; the dark and terrible things that were happening all around them, which they'd chosen to bear, were more than anyone could be asked to endure. And yet, even when he’d begged them. Even when he’d pleaded…

He’d only wanted to leave the onslaught of death behind. What little sincere happiness he’d managed to find and hold onto was more precious than anything. But they'd disagreed. He’d known they would. It wasn’t in them to leave Vesuvia behind. It wasn’t in them to do less than their best, to give anything but their all to save the people of the city, even when it was clear that total destruction was the only path left. And despite his tears, despite the unmendable fissure in his heart at being so very far from them, Asra didn’t have it in him to begrudge them their decisions.

In the end, he’d left them behind.

_He_ left _them_.

Not the other way around.

The fissure in his heart was the first of many cracks, ever more spitting and dividing as the days went by. Distance and time did little to heal his heart’s wounds, only allowing them to bleed more. Often, his thoughts swirled anxiously; more than once he nearly left Nopal to return to Vesuvia, plague be damned. But the little voice that whispered at the back of his head told him to wait. When it was over, he could go back. When it was over, he could return, he could fall to his knees, he could beg, _beg_, them to forgive him, to take him back, to see that he only meant to preserve their lives.

(Because if they remained behind, there was no choice but for it to all be over one day. They _couldn’t_ fall with the city, the way he’d been so afraid it would. If they were there…she _had_ to be alright. There was no acceptable alternative.)

And then, the news came that they were dying by the thousands, and Asra’s heart fluttered as feebly as a butterfly caught in a storm over the sea. He wasted no more time waiting for something that seemed so far out of reach. If everyone was going to die, and if they insisted on remaining behind, then he’d return, and be with them, because that was better than nothing. The news came and he wasted no time in leaving the little house he’d made for himself.

A house, not a home, because they weren't there beside him. As beautiful a place as it was, it was empty and featureless without them , when all he could think was that they were meant to be there beside him, meant to fill the empty spaces and the silent moments that reigned in the little adobe. Never had he hated being alone – truly alone – until then.

He thought.

Vesuvia was far different than the home he remembered. The streets were barren and the only sounds were of weeping, and a foul stench and dark smoke flooded the streets. He ignored it all. Outside the shop, their sign still hung, their mortar and pestle, surrounded by his snake, the indicator of their union, their partnership, but when he went to the door only to find it without its usual protections, his fragile heart shook in his breast. Inside, the floors were dusty, the shelves empty of the usual wares. Upstairs, in their room, the bed was made, but the closet empty.

Unlived in.

The palace, he reassured himself. Of course. Where else? They'd stayed behind to help, and that was where all who desired to provide aid had been summoned.

One last look around the place that had been…that _was_ his home, and Asra stalked out, fresh tears burning in his eyes. It could be home again, but only if they would let him. It was their shop, before it was theirs. Their home, before they invited him into it. Their bed before they'd pulled him into it.

(_He_ had left _them_.)

At the palace, the guards escorted him around the structure, to the docks hidden behind. He’d been inside before, a few times when he was older, after they met Nadia; the common folk were able to enjoy the Masquerade, but only, of course, from a distance, and so he'd been barred most of his life. When they reached the docks, much to his surprise, he was placed in a boat. When he asked, they said little. The island beyond, over which hung a black and ashy grey miasma, was the quarantine location. If he wanted to help, that was where it could be done. Neither stepped foot on land themselves, but another two were waiting. The structure they brought him to was unlike anything he imagined. Dark, curtained, and dank, Asra felt his heart plummet. Here was where the dying spent their last days on earth, in the bleak and the grime. The stink of the place was incredible, the unmistakable reek of illness, of the dead and dying. And something else. Something that eluded him. Distinct. Uncomfortable.

He was brought before a nurse, and left there, to wait, anxiously, for him to have a moment to speak with him. Silently, he watched the white coated doctors and their assistants as they worked to the discordant chorus of moans and coughs, crying and wheezing. Silently, Asra took his fill, his punishment. This was what he’d left them with. This was what he’d abandoned them to endure alone, while he wiled his days away in isolated comfort, and then, not even had the gall to enjoy it. Without them, it had been meaningless. But it was anything but the torture he’d imagined it to be, he realized, looking out at the desolation the plague had wrought.

This was what they had chosen.

In his disgust, Asra felt shame, and though he wanted to close his eyes, he found himself unable to look away.

The nurse stood from the desk without acknowledging him and, though he started to speak, the man disappeared behind a curtain, leaving Asra alone in the wake of the plague’s devastation. Three personnel came out from another room, two carrying either end of a stretcher, a still moving body covered with a sheet between them, the third, a tall fellow with deep red hair, peeling off towards the desk. Morbidly, Asra was drawn to the route that the two took, watching as a hand slide off from beneath, pale and bone thin, grasping at Asra as they passed.

“Excu-excuse me!” he said, rather softly as the other passed him by on the way to the desk. “I’m looking for someone who works here. Please, have you seen-“

The doctor looked up, and his eyebrows twitched, and his frown, ever present, deepened. “You’re Asra. The magician.”

Taken aback, Asra shifted, and watched, realization dawning on his features, as the Doctor’s face contorted into an expression of deep, inextinguishable sorrow. The tears were burning hot across his cheeks before he realized they’d welled. “N-no. No..” his voice was small, wavering, and fearful, even as he shook his head viciously in denial. “No!” He fairly sobbed the word. Inside his chest, the fragile remnants of his heart shattered, and the half that was them, the half he’d thought he’d already lost, burst and bled, an open wound against his soul. Agony ripped through him as he fell to his knees, wretchedly, weeping, his mouth open in a silent scream.

“They went to the Lazarat a week ago. I’m…I’m sorry.”

“The Lazarat?” he managed, swallowing his sobs.

The look the Doctor gave him in return was one that he couldn’t bear to face, and finally, Asra allowed himself to shut his eyes, lashes thick with tears, and slump to the ground further.

“There’s a cemetery out behind the Lazarat. You…you can…they're…there.”

Wordless, soundless, expressionless, Asra finally rose, and without so much as an indicator that he’d heart, turned and left the doctor where he stood, resigned and apologetic.

The place where his heart beat, ragged and ruined, was slowly ebbing to a sort of dull ache as his vision glazed, his hearing muted, his vision dimmed, the pain so overwhelming that processing it was impossible. That the only recourse was to completely shut down. A figure brushed past him, and he felt himself reach out for their arm, stopping them. He heart himself asking the question, though his mind wouldn’t stop screaming, and his ravaged heart kept leaking blood, so much that he was sure it would seep through his skin, find its way to the surface, to cool and dry.

He heard the answer, too.

_“The Lazaret? That’s where they take the ones who are beyond saving. That’s where they’re burned. I’ll never forget the sound of their screams.”_

It was all Asra could do to take another step. And another, and another.

_“Are you alright? Excuse me, did you hear me?”_

Another. Another.

Slow at first, and then faster, until he was bursting through the doors, flying along towards the column of smoke, towards the crematorium, towards the soft grey ash that billowed up like clouds, towards the uneven mounds of black sooty soil, simply marked, which lay beyond. He tripped, fell to his knees, crawled through the dirt on his hands and knees to the most recent patch, eyes frantically scanning the names etched haphazardly on the basic markers for the most achingly familiar shape of their name. Maybe they weren't there, maybe it was a mistake, maybe they'd left, recognizing futility and headed for Nopal, and he’d just missed them. Maybe it was someone else. Anyone else.

Anyone but them.

Anyone!

There, the hard consonants and the soft vowels that comprised their name arranged themselves in order along the wooden board that served as their only memoriam. For a moment, Asra was petrified in place, and then, that silvered heartstring snapped and the world, which had stilled and zoomed into that one point of focus came rushing back, loud and agonizing. Rough screams haunted the clearing, cut off every few moments by sudden silence. The smell of burning flesh hung thick in the air and he could taste the ash in his mouth, could feel it sticking in his hair, clinging to his damp cheeks, coating his lungs. Before he knew he was moving, scrabbling at the dirt with his bare hands until they were caked in it, until his nails broke and the tender flesh bled dark and watery into the soil, until the blackened, charred fragments of bone found his hands and he collapsed over their grave.

This, this was torture. This was worse than death, to know that he had abandoned them to their death. That he had left them to the most awful of fates. That they had died alone.

That he hadn’t known it.

The bloodsoaked remnants of his heart quaked and tremoured, crumbling finally to dust, and he spread himself across the grave, intermingling his wounded soul with all that remained of their earthly body.

He lay there he knew not how long, waiting, waiting to be infected, to die, to lose himself as he had always lost everyone else. His parents, them, Muriel…

He waited to turn to ash and bone.

They sky had already been dark when he arrived, the clouds of smoke enough to blot out the sun even on a bright day, but the moon rose, and Asra slowly blinked back to consciousness. Somehow, resiliently, a piece of his heart still beat. Punishment. Punishment worse than death.

Asra rose, a ghost in the night, a shade of what he had once been. Kneeling before the marker, he pressed a chaste kiss to the head of their grave and recovered it with languished movements.

Death was a recourse he was not to be allowed.

True death was a kindness he hadn’t earned.

As he walked away, a limping, wounded creature, unrecognizable to himself, to the world, he looked up to the moon and swallowed the shaking breaths that filled his beleaguered lungs. Asra slid his hands along his cheeks, smearing the ash away, his expression blank and hard.

Inside the hospital building, the staff avoided him, ironic, considering, but he walked without hesitation through the building until he found the doctor who had known them, biting his lip as he pulled a sheet over a patient who was sobbing silently.

“Oh. You…you’re back.”

He had no words, he found, even when standing there before the man’s pitying expression.

“A moment, if you will.”

Asra waited, and the doctor returned with a small box.

“Their things. Someone should have them. I’m…I’m sorry.”

The box felt weightless in Asra’s hands as he took it without complaint, and turned to go.

The night was silent. The guards that rowed him back over did so only at the doctor’s order, and said nothing to him in turn.

He found the shop just the way he’d left it, open to any and all, abandoned, empty, gutted, and yet, full to the brim with ghosts. Leaving the box on the counter, Asra took the steps one at a time. In the bedroom, he sat on the floor in the moonlight, eyes dry, hands in his lap, and did not sleep, as the ghosts of the past drifted around him, taunting and tempting and beyond all reach.


End file.
